SCIENTISTS have created the ultimate foolproof flat-pack - a furniture kit that talks to you, it was revealed yesterday.

The Ikea wardrobe, which contains "smart" technology, simply refuses to be put together wrongly.

Sensors allow it to talk the customer through the job, transmitting instructions, tips and warnings to a computer screen.

The idea was dreamed up by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

They found 44 different paths someone working without instructions can take to fit the pieces of an Ikea wardrobe together, but only eight resulted in a safe construction.

Followed correctly, instruction sheets supplied by the Swedish furniture manufacturer should lead to a perfect result.

But often people putting together flat-pack furniture ignore the assembly order in the instructions.

"People find this annoying so they don't follow them," Stavros Antifakos, who led the Swiss team, told New Scientist magazine.

The researchers fixed movement and pressure sensors to the six pieces that make up the sides of an Ikea wardrobe.

These fed data to a battery-powered microchip built into one of the parts.

New Scientist magazine reported, "This works out where all the pieces are in relation to each other and generates instructions, tips and warnings that appear on a separate computer screen, which is connected over a wireless link."

Eventually the team hopes to build small, cheap LED-based displays in the parts. If it started flashing this would mean you are trying to force the wrong parts together.